RIOT is a somehow magical tool run by elves or little fairies or something. I'm not sure how it works. But it optimizes your images and lets you convert between jpeg/gif/png freely. It is also available as a DLL plugin for "The GIMP, IrfanView, XnView and other supporting applications". It works on Windows only. There is also a plugin available that adds support for RAW and HDR formats.

It can be very simple, with just a few clicks you can shrink file sizes down to almost nothing. I've had images go from hundreds of megabytes down to the low double digit range. And I don't even know what I'm doing! There are a lot of sliders and checkboxes and different settings that I don't mess with.

There are some minor adjustments you can make too, brightness/contrast/gamma. You can also strip metadata if you want.

It's a great tool that I think everyone (who uses Windows) should have. I think Irfanview already has it as a plugin, but the standalone tool is great for quickly shrinking a file.

I took a small screenshot of the forum here, and used RIOT to optimize it. The screenshot was taken with Windows 7's clipping tool and saved as a PNG.

Original: 18.1k

Optimized: 6.63k

Now, I optimized this image using 16 colors, an option I had because Scot's uses a lot of blues so taking it down to 16 colors wasn't a big deal. You can tell it was optimized but it's hardly noticeable. Saving it as "256 Colors" still reduced the filesize to 8.87k. True Color still had it down to 16.8k (admittedly a much smaller savings of space!)

I think that's because I used 16 colors though. You can pick more colors and I bet the sharpness would be back. Or if there are lots of colors you can convert to jpeg (a PNG with a lot of colors is going to be big) and get it pretty small, too. I'm at a different computer that doesn't have the original image on it but I'll look later. And of course if you convert from a GIF you should pretty much always get smaller files.

Thanks for this, Neil. I've learned that people like pictures in articles but images also slow down the page load. I don't need anything fancy, just a simple way of reducing the size. RIOT fits the bill.